Taking up his pen as a knight a lance, Sebastian Castellio was aware that a purely spiritual attack upon a dictatorship in the panoply of material armour would prove ineffectual, and that he was, therefore, fighting for a lost cause. How could an unarmed man, a solitary, expect to vanquish Calvin, who was backed by thousands of soul-slaves, and equipped with all the powers of the State? A master of the art of organization, Calvin had been able to transform a whole city, a whole State, whose numerous burghers had hitherto been freemen, into a rigidly obedient machine; had been able to extirpate independence, and to lay an embargo on freedom of thought in favour of his own exclusive doctrine.
Calvin held sway over the printing presses, the pulpits and the professorial chairs; as wax in his hands were the various authorities, Town Council, university and law-courts, priests and schools, catchpoles and prisons, the written and the spoken and even the secretly whispered word.
Sebastian Castellio, the lonely idealist, had in the name of freedom of thought renounced allegiance to Calvin's as to every other spiritual tyranny. He denied that those in the seats of the mighty were entitled to harm anyone because of private opinions. Castellio declared that no earthly power was entitled to exercise authority over a man's conscience. Here was a man who, during one of those periods of collective insanity with which the world is from time to time afflicted, dared to keep his mind immune from popular hallucinations.
So perennial is the cowardice of our race that Castellio and his like who defy those in high places need look for few if any supporters. Thus it came to pass that in the decisive hour Sebastian Castellio found no backers.
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